“Lead” by Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce was a pioneer writer of realist fiction, one of the most influential journalists in the United States, a horror author ranked among Lovecraft and Poe, one of the greatest American satirists, a fabulist and a poet, a feared literary critic, and a Civil War veteran. It is thanks to his parents, poor but literary, that he grew up with a deep love for books and writing. 

His poem “Lead” is about the metal, which was the material that bullets were made out of in the Civil War. In the first lines of the poem, he hails Lead like a god:

“Hail, holy Lead!—of human feuds the great

And universal arbiter; endowed

With penetration to pierce any cloud”

Lead did allow people to play God in a way humans were never meant to. It is the great and universal arbiter of human feuds, for there is no way to end a feud that is more final than to kill your opposition. 

“Fogging the field of controversial hate,

And with swift, inevitable, straight,

Searching precision find the unavowed

But vital point. Thy judgment, when allowed

By the chirurgeon, settles the debate.”

In these lines he describes how bullets find the “unavowed / But vital point,” where it hits you and you bleed out. The debate is settled by death, as noted in those last two lines, a chirurgeon being an old word for a surgeon. Bierce notes that if it weren’t for lead bullets, humans would fight by hand:

“O useful metal!—were it not for thee

We’d grapple one another’s ears away”

But when humans hear bullets, they flee:

“But when we hear thee buzzing like a bee

We, like old Muhlenberg, ‘care not to stay.’”

What really stands out to me in this poem are the last two lines. While the rest of the poem is in iambic pentameter, the last two lines have one extra syllable each and they rhyme, forming a final couplet. The poem is organized into a sonnet, though it doesn’t have the typical “ABAB” structure of a Shakespearean sonnet; instead, its rhyme scheme goes: ABBA ABBA CDCD EE. But it’s not just the formatting that makes the last two lines stand out, it’s that they introduce a character, Satan, who changes the direction of the poem from a satirical war poem to something, in my opinion, much darker.

“And when the quick have run away like pullets

Jack Satan smelts the dead to make new bullets.”

Note that quick, in this instance, means “living,” and pullets are young chickens. This is an interesting visual of Satan smelting corpses into new bullets, and also an interesting message that as we kill so many people with guns we continue to make more bullets to kill even more people. It seems to me that Satan in this line represents mankind. Since Satan is the foil to God, Bierce is implying that humans are the foil to God. 

.58 caliber Minie balls from the American Civil War

“Lead” is part of a larger work, Bierce’s most famous, called The Devil’s Dictionary, which was a series of installments published in newspapers from 1881 to 1906. The dictionary contains common words with humorous and satirical definitions, some of which are complete with poems, but some are just definitions. 

Bierce defines Lead as: “A heavy blue-gray metal much used in giving stability to light lovers—particularly to those who love not wisely but other men’s wives. Lead is also of great service as a counterpoise to an argument of such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong way. An interesting fact in the chemistry of international controversy is that at the point of contact of two patriotisms lead is precipitated in great quantities,” followed by the poem.

The line “Lead is also of great service as a counterpoise to an argument of such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong way” seems to reflect the content of the poem best. Part of the first line, “particularly to those who love not wisely but other men’s wives,” mirrors Bierce’s own life, as he separated from his wife in 1888 when he found compromising letters to her from an admirer, and they divorced in 1904.